The Exaggerations, Lies, Distortions, and Flip-Flops Of Barack Obama (UPDATED)

Originally posted May 7, 2008. Re-posted with updates.

(July 15): My sincere apologies for the excessive length of this post, but I aim to be thorough, and as more evidence of Obama’s dishonesty pours in, I have to update this post. Hence, it continues to grow with no end in sight.

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Check out this excerpt from Obama’s North Carolina victory speech:

The attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences, to turn us against each other for political gain, to slice and dice this country into red states and blue states, blue collar and white collar, white, black, brown, young, old, rich, poor … this is the race we expect, no matter whether it’s myself or Senator Clinton who is the nominee. The question then is not what kind of campaign they will run; it’s what kind of campaign we will run.

It’s what we will do to make this year different. You see, I didn’t get into this race thinking that I could avoid this kind of politics, but I am running for president because this is the time to end it.

We will end it — we will end it this time not because I’m perfect. I think we know at this phase of the campaign that I am not.

We will end it not by duplicating the same tactics and the same strategies as the other side, because that will lead us down the same path of polarization and of gridlock.

We will end it by telling the truth.

We will end it by telling the truth forcefully, repeatedly, confidently, and by trusting that the American people will embrace the need for change, even if it’s coming from an imperfect messenger, because that’s how we’ve — that’s — because that’s how we’ve always changed this country, not from the top down, but from the bottom up, when you, the American people, decide that the stakes are too high and the challenges are too great.

That’s right. Barack Obama fancies himself to be the truth-telling candidate. And anyone who says otherwise will (of course) be accused of racism, and “playing on our fears”.

Well, I don’t care. I’m pretty thick skinned. Let’s just examine how truthful this man is:

♦Obama claims the Kennedy family payed for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship to meet his Kansan mother.

Status – NOT TRUE:

Contrary to Obama’s claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama’s father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.

♦Obama claims that a detailed questionaire filled out in his name, in 1996, with responses reflecting ultra liberal views on everything from gun control to abortion, was filled out by an aide, and doesn’t reflect his views.

Status: LIE

… a Politico examination determined that Obama was actually interviewed about the issues on the questionnaire by the liberal Chicago nonprofit group that issued it. And it found that Obama — the day after sitting for the interview — filed an amended version of the questionnaire, which appears to contain Obama’s own handwritten notes added to one answer.

♦Obama cites photo of black man bleaching his skin in Dreams From My Father. Claims said photo gave him the feeling of an “Ambush Attack”

Status – NOT TRUE: No such photo appears to exist.

♦Obama states in January 2008 debate: “I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single-payer.

Status: Flip-flop or LIE: Barack at AFL-CIO conference in June 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of single-payer universal healthcare coverage.

♦Obama in 2004: Doesn’t see himself running for President in 2008: “If I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket…I would essentially have to start now…before having served a day in the Senate. Now there might be some people who would have no problem doing that, but ah…I’m not one of them“.

He said two years ago that he would “absolutely” serve out his Senate term, which ends in 2011, and that the idea of him running for president this cycle was “silly” and hype “that’s been a little overblown”.

In an appearance on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, January 22nd, 2006:

Russert: “When we talked back in November of ’04 after your election, I said, ‘There’s been enormous speculation about your political future. Will you serve your six-year term as United States senator from Illinois?'”

Obama: “I will serve out my full six-year term. You know, Tim, if you get asked enough, sooner or later you get weary and you start looking for new ways of saying things. But my thinking has not changed.”

Russert: “So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?”

Obama: “I will not.”

Status: Gross flip-flop or LIE. Obviously.

♦In July ’07 Barack Obama tells a group of reporters in Boston that the United States has an “absolute obligation” to remain in Iraq long enough to make it a success: “The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster,” he said at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, according to an audiotape of the session. “It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died. . . . It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.”

Status – Flip-flop or LIE: Obama Campaign pledge 9/07: Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq.

♦Obama tells this stirring tale to a Selma audience: He had been conceived by his parents, Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham, because they had been inspired by the fervor following the “Bloody Sunday” voting rights demonstration that was commemorated March 4.

Status – Bad Info or LIE: Obama was born in 1961, and the Selma march occurred four years later, in 1965.

♦On January 24, 2008, the Obama campaign released a statement, saying, “To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Status: NOT TRUE:

The Associated Press reports that “documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim” while at a Catholic school during first through third grades. …the Chicago Tribune confirms that Obama was “listed as a Muslim on the registration form for the Catholic school.” A blogger who goes by “An American Expat in Southeast Asia” found that “Barack Hussein Obama was registered under the name ‘Barry Soetoro’ serial number 203 and entered the Franciscan Asisi Primary School on 1 January 1968 and sat in class 1B. … Barry’s religion was listed as Islam.”

…the Toronto Star visited the Jakarta public school Obama attended and found that “Three of his teachers have said he was enrolled as a Muslim.”

♦Obama told the Sun-Times his “best estimate” was that Rezko raised “between $50,000 and $60,000” during Obama’s political career.

Status: Very sloppy fact-checking, or LIE: Obama has collected at least $168,308 from Rezko and his circle. Additionally, Obama also has taken in an unknown amount of money from people who attended fund-raising events hosted by Rezko since the mid-1990s.

♦During a nationally televised debate last fall, Obama hesitantly raised his hand and joined with most of his Democrat rivals to declare that he opposed decriminalizing marijuana. (first video).

Status: Stupid gaffe, or LIE:

But as a candidate for the U.S. Senate four years ago, Mr. Obama told Illinois college students that he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use or possession, according to a videotape of a little noticed debate that was obtained by The Washington Times.

“I think we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws,” Mr. Obama told an audience during a debate at Northwestern University in 2004. “But I’m not somebody who believes in legalization of marijuana.” (second video).

♦ Obama promised to use public funding in the general election if the Republican candidate would do so also.

Status: Welcher:

Well, McCain has agreed to it, but now Obama wants to back out of the deal. After all, when he made the promise, he didn’t have a chance of raising more than the public’s $85 million stipend. But now that he can raise $300 million, well, what’s a little untruth between the waited-for one and his people? Yes, he can.

♦Obama’s campaign claims he meant every word he said about overturning the free-trade treaty, and that no one had contacted the Canadian diplomatic corps to reassure them that it was mere demagoguery.

Status: LIE:

CTV responded today by naming names — and suddenly the Obama campaign has grown quiet.

CTV didn’t stop there. They also announced that their sources, at “the highest levels of the Canadian government”, reconfirmed the story to CTV. One of their primary sources provided a timeline of the discussion to CTV. Contrary to some reports, CTV has not retreated at all from this story.

Jim Geraghty notes:

I realize Obama’s campaign can still claim that one of his advisers went rogue in contacting the Canadians about his NAFTA rhetoric, but to me, this is game, set and match to CTV. … If Goolsbee had not talked to officials in the consulate, it seems likely that his answer would have been, “No, I didn’t talk to them.”

♦Obama: I didn’t hear (reverend Wright’s) inflammatory sermons.

Status: BULL

♦Barack Obama, May 2008: he never sought Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s counsel on political issues.

Status: LIE:

Obama January 2007: “What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice,” Obama said. “He’s much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics.”

Also:

Mr. Obama consulted Mr. Wright before deciding to run for president. He prayed privately with Mr. Wright before announcing his candidacy last year.

♦Obama continues to claim that McCain favors 100 more years of US troops fighting in Iraq:

Status: Gross distortion:

What McCain actually said:

QUESTIONER: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years —

McCAIN: Maybe a hundred.

QUESTIONER: Is that — is that —

McCAIN: We’ve been in South Korea — we’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans —

QUESTIONER: So that’s your policy?

McCAIN: — As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, then it’s fine with me. I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, and equipping and motivating people every single day.

♦Hotair reports:

The Barack Obama campaign responded to the pictures of Obama political and community associate William Ayers stomping on the American flag, first published in 2001 in Chicago Magazine. In a statement reported on Fox & Friends this morning, Team Obama deplores Ayers’ actions but rejects any connection between Ayers and Obama:

Status: Doesn’t add up!

That distance might be hard to maintain. First, the profile in the magazine wasn’t exactly a low-profile article in an obscure publication. Ayers had just published a memoir of his days as a fugitive for domestic terrorism in the Weather Underground, and both the book and the publicity gained national attention, especially after 9/11. Obama continued to work with Ayers after this, appearing on public panels with Ayers into 2002.

If Team Obama wants to disassociate itself from Ayers in this manner, it should recheck its website. Obama still defends William Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn as part of Chicago’s “mainstream”. Does Obama think that stomping on a flag in an alley to celebrate a memoir of domestic terrorism represents the mainstream of political thought?

Important Source: The Obama File, Freedoms Enemies

To be continued….

MORE:

♦Obama said in his North Carolina victory speech:

The other side can label and name-call all they want, but I trust the American people to recognize that it is not surrender to end the war in Iraq so that we can rebuild our military and go after Al Qaida’s leaders.I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.

Status: NOT QUITE:

Ed Morrissey:

I’m particularly bemused by the references to FDR and Truman. Both men ended up having to conduct massive wars that outlasted their presidencies, and in FDR’s case in no small measure because Western nations insisted on talk rather than action. While we maintained diplomatic contact with Germany and Japan until Pearl Harbor, FDR did not meet with Hitler and Tojo. And that diplomatic contact didn’t stop war from coming; indeed, it make it much worse than it otherwise would have been, at least in Europe, had the US, UK, and France had taken the appropriate steps to disarm Hitler when he started his Versailles Treaty violations.

Truman met with Joseph Stalin during and after World War II, but that didn’t stop the Soviets from blockading West Berlin or ringing down an iron curtain across eastern Europe, enslaving those nations for almost 50 years. If Potsdam and Yalta are Obama’s idea of successful foreign policy, then he obviously hasn’t studied 20th century history. Talking with implacable tyrants leads to appeasement, which leads to either war or more implacability of the tyranny in question.

UPDATE (May 10):

♦Obama says he’s been to 57 states during a campaign stop.

Status: GAFFE.

UPDATE II (May 23):

♦In a speech to a crowd in Palm beach Florida, Obama says hate crimes against Hispanics doubled in 2007, and blames it on xenophobics Lou Dobbs, and Rush Limbaugh.

STATUS: Pulling numbers out of his ass.

The 2007 hate crimes statistics have not been released yet.

Gateway Pundit:

The 2006 hate crime statistics were released in late November 2007:Anti-Hispanic Incidents in 2005 – 522 Anti-Hispanic Incidents in 2006 – 576 This showed a 10% increase.

Even most lefty trolls these days know better than to throw out phony statistics that can be easily checked.

RELATED:

Michelle Malkin with Barack Obama: Gaffe Machine

UPDATE III (May 27):

♦During a Memorial Day speech, yesterday, Obama mentioned an uncle who helped liberate Auschwitz…only problem is…The Red Army liberated Auschwitz. He has also been known to mention his grandfather in speeches, as having marched in Patton’s army, and heard stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. It seems that US troops never got near Auschwitz or Treblinka.

Status: Not sure. The charitable among us would attribute this to a gaffe, but those of us on the more cynical side are calling BS: Fabrication or lie. You decide.

Another Obama Memorial Day Oopsie:

♦Gateway Pundit:

Barack Obama opens up his Memorial Day speech in Las Cruces, New Mexico:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

Needless to say….he didn’t see any of our fallen soldiers in the audience unless he truly does have super ninja, messianic supernatural powers.

Status: Inexcusably stupid gaffe.

UPDATE IV (June 23):

Wow, I haven’t updated in almost a month…they’re coming in hot and heavy now…I have some catching up to do!

♦Obama on a publicly financed election:

“If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” –Barack Obama, answer to Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire, September 2007.

In February 2007, Barack Obama challenged Republican presidential candidates to agree to public financing of the general election. John McCain responded positively, prompting Obama’s campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, to call on other Republican candidates to follow suit. The headline in the New York Times: “McCain and Obama in Deal on Public Financing.”

Status: Bad joke

Fast forward 16 months. Both Obama and McCain have locked up their party’s nominations for the presidency. Obama announces that the system of public financing “is broken,” and he will rely on his well-oiled private fundraising machine.

George will caught Obama fudging on the issue of black crime:

♦Last July, Obama said that “more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities.”

Status: Not true

Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail.

♦Last September he said, “We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives.”

Status: Not true

But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute’s City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that:

“In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer.”

As we’ve all come to expect, Obama whipped out the Race Card:

♦”We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from.”

Status: BS:

Indeed, in 2006, blacks, who are less than 13 percent of the population, were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners. About one in 33 black men was in prison, compared with one in 79 Hispanic men and one in 205 white men.

But Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offenses: “In 2005 the black homicide rate was over seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. . . . From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent of all murders.” Do police excessively arrest blacks? “The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data.”

Ed Morrissey remembers this classic:

♦Obama once bragged that he would debate McCain “anywhere, anytime” on foreign policy…

Status: Not so much:

He declined to accept McCain’s challenge to join him in 10 town meetings, and has opted to only do one on the 4th of July when no one will be watching.

…To be continued….

UPDATE (June 25):

Oh yeah. I almost forgot this whopper:

♦Barack Obama’s first general election ad says that he passed laws that “extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.”

STATUS: He did nothing of the sort.

The ad “Country I Love”, which was released Friday, provides a citation at the bottom of the screen which reads “Public Law 110 – 181.”

The problem is Senator Obama never voted for that legislation. Public Law 110 – 181 is part of the defense authorization bill which passed the Senate in January by a vote of 91 to three with six senators not voting. Barack Obama was among those six absent senators.

UPDATE:

♦Obama favors gay civil unions and repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, but he opposes gay marriage.

STATUS: Flip flop? Lie? He has no clue what he thinks?

Who the hell knows. This is Obama we’re talking about:

After previously saying he opposed gay marriage and that he respected the rights of states to set conditions for marriage, Obama has now said that he opposes California’s initiative to ban gay marriage — and that he would use federal law to end such efforts.

UPDATE: (July 3):

From Fact Check.Org:

♦Obama’s latest ad repeats an often-stated claim, saying he “worked his way through college and Harvard Law.”

STATUS: Bull.

We know Obama took out loans to get himself through school. But the campaign provided information on just two jobs Obama had in those years, and they were both in the summer.

‘Working yourself through school’ is widely understood to mean ‘working while attending school’, not just during the summer.

Also:

♦The ad also says he “passed a law to move people from welfare to work, slashed the rolls by 80 percent.”

STATUS: Exaggeration

Actually, the Illinois law was a required follow-up to the 1996 federal welfare reform law worked out by President Clinton and the Republican Congress. Welfare rolls did go down by nearly as much as the ad says, but Obama can’t claim sole credit.

UPDATE: (July 9):

Obama Camp back in October ’07:

♦”To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

STATUS: MAJOR flip flop as far as the nutroots are concerned.

Obama votes for FISA bill which includes the controversial provision of retroactive immunity for telecom companies facing lawsuit.

UPDATE: (July 15):

In his July 14 New York Times op-ed, (Picked apart by John Hinderaker of Powerline):

♦Obama admits that he opposed the surge, and the attendant change in strategy and tactics, that have brought us close to victory. But he somehow manages to twist his being wrong about the surge–the major foreign policy issue that has arisen during his time in Congress–into vindication:

“But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge”.

STATUS: BULL.

Hinderaker explains:

Actually, however, Obama opposed the surge not because of those “factors” but because he thought it would fail. He said, on January 10, 2007, on MSNBC:

I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.

Please refer to the Powerline post for many more examples of Obama making the same point throughout all of 2007…the surge was going to fail. There are just too many quotes to list here.

Hinderaker again:

♦…his op-ed somehow twists this history into vindication on the theory that Afghanistan has deteriorated, the Iraq war has been expensive, and Iraq’s political leaders “have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.”

STATUS: Huh?

Let’s start with the last point. Obama completely fails to acknowledge the remarkable political progress that has resulted from the surge, as manifested by the fact that the country’s largest Sunni bloc has rejoined the government, and the U.S. Embassy reports that 15 of the 18 benchmarks of political progress that were set by Congress are now being met. Those benchmarks were set precisely for the purpose of measuring the “political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge,” yet Obama fails even to mention them.

Still more dishonest is Obama’s failure to acknowledge what would have happened if his policy prescription, precipitate withdrawal regardless of military conditions, had been followed: chaos, sectarian violence, possibly genocide, a resurgent al Qaeda in control of part of Iraq, with Iran possibly in control of other areas of the country. This would have been a foreign policy disaster, yet Obama, with vague references to cost and Afghanistan, claims vindication!

♦Obama also says in his NYTs op-ed: “Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been.”

STATUS: False

Hinderaker again:

That’s not what Osama bin Laden (Iraq is where the “Third World War is raging”) or Ayman al-Zawahiri (Iraq is “the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era”) say. Al Qaeda summoned jihadists from around the Muslim world to go to Iraq to fight American troops, declaring that this effort is the central front in their war against civilization. Those jihadists have been devastated by American armed forces, who have thereby scored what may, with hindsight, turn out to have been the decisive victory in the war against Muslim extremism. Obama denies all of this in a single sentence, without citing any evidence whatsoever.

♦Finally, in the NYTs piece, Obama claims to have been firmly committed to victory in Afghanistan.

STATUS: Bull. Hinderaker finds otherwise:

In fact, Obama has never supported our troops in Afghanistan. On the contrary, he said on August 14, 2007–less than a year ago–that our forces there are mostly committing war crimes:

We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.

Obama has been so uninterested in Afghanistan that when he went to Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with a Congressional delegation in January 2006, he skipped the opportunity to continue on to Afghanistan, which was taken by others who made the trip with him, including Kit Bond and Harold Ford. And, in an embarrassing gaffe, Obama claimed on May 13, 2008, that we don’t have enough “Arabic interpreters, Arab language speakers” in Afghanistan because they are all being used in Iraq. Obama thereby demonstrated the intellectual laziness and incuriosity that characterizes his campaign: they don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan, and, anyway, interpreters are drawn from local populations, not shipped around the world.

Worst of all, far from being committed to victory in Afghanistan, Obama voted to cut off all funding for all of our military efforts in Afghanistan on May 24, 2007 (H.R. 2206, CQ Vote #181), thereby seeking to bring about defeat there as well as in Iraq. His current effort to portray himself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing on Afghanistan is a complete fraud.

Ouch.

Hinderaker’s conclusion:

It is possible that at some point in American history there may have been a major politician as dishonest as Barack Obama, but I can’t offhand think of such a miscreant.

Double ouch.

♦Obama in an interview in 2004, before the nation got to know TUCC and Reverend Wright, expounds on his regular church attendance:

GG:
Do you still attend Trinity?

OBAMA:
Yep. Every week. 11 oclock service.

Ever been there? Good service.

I actually wrote a book called Dreams from My Father, it’s kind of a meditation on race. There’s a whole chapter on the church in that, and my first visits to Trinity.

STATUS: I have no idea, but his story has significantly changed now that we’ve gotten to know the radical nature of his church and Pastor. Here he is in a recent interview with Newsweek:

As young marrieds, Barack and Michelle (who also didn’t go to church regularly as a child) went to church fairly often-two or three times a month. But after their first child, Malia, was born, they found making the effort more difficult. “I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of taking young, squirming children to church, but it’s not easy,” he says. “Trinity was always packed, and so you had to get there early. And if you went to the morning service, you were looking at-it just was difficult. So that would cut back on our involvement.”

After he began his run for the U.S. Senate, he says, the family sometimes didn’t go to Trinity for months at a time.

Note that Malia was born in 1998.

UPDATE (JULY 23):

This one’s just bizarre.

♦Obama claims to be on the Senate Banking Committee so he can claim credit for work on a particular bill:

STATUS: False

He’s not on the banking committee. He’s not on any of the subcommittees. We’re not sure if he’s lying, or just doesn’t have a clue, but this is pretty damn sad.

UPDATE (August 11):

♦Obama claims that he would have voted for the Born Alive Infants Protection Act when he was a Senator in the Illinois legislature, if it had included the same pre-birth neutrality clause that was in the bill adopted unanimously by the US Congress in 2002.

STATUS: Damnable LIE.

NRLC reports:

Documents obtained by NRLC now demonstrate conclusively that Obama’s entire defense is based on a brazen factual misrepresentation.

The documents prove that in March 2003, state Senator Obama, then the chairman of the Illinois state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting in which the “neutrality clause” (copied verbatim from the federal bill) was added to the state BAIPA, with Obama voting in support of adding the revision. Yet, immediately afterwards, Obama led the committee Democrats in voting against the amended bill, and it was killed, 6-4.

The bill that Chairman Obama killed, as amended, was virtually identical to the federal law; the only remaining differences were on minor points of bill-drafting style. To see the language of the two bills side by side, click here.

To see the official “Senate Committee Action Report” on this meeting, click on one of the links below. (The document is dated March 12, 2003, which is the day that the committee convened, but Chairman Obama recessed the meeting until March 13, which is the day that these votes actually occurred.)

Here are links to the official document that records these votes, in three different formats.

Senate Committee Action Report in HTML (web browser) format

Senate Committee Action Report in JPG (photo) format

Senate Committee Action Report in PDF (Adobe document) format

This lie is, in my opinion, his most disgusting one of all. As Ed Morrissey at Hot Air says:

Clearly, Obama lied about his position. It’s no small rhetorical matter, either. His vote puts him on the extreme of the pro-abortion camp, so extreme in fact that not a single member of Congress would follow his example. Obama voted to allow Christ Hospital and other facilities performing abortions to allow live children to die.

This is why, when I called the Obama’s “the most pro abortion couple in America”, I wasn’t exaggerating..

UPDATE: (August 18):

♦At the Saddleback Faith Forum with Pastor Rick Warren, Obama states: “The fact is, is that even though we’ve had a President who’s been opposed to abortion over the last eight years, abortions have not gone down”.

Status: He’s yanking your chain.

According the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute there has been a decline in abortions under Bush’s presidency:

In 2005, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million in 2000.

Every chart on abortion statistics that I can find shows an decrease in abortions during Bush’s tenure.

Obama appears to have thrown that in, to convince people that even though he’s one of the very few human beings on this planet who who would fight to keep the horrific practice of infanticide, legal, his Democratic policies would somehow make abortion more rare.

Nice try, Obambi.

UPDATE (September 10):

♦Obama promises to fire anyone on his campaign staff caught spreading rumors about Sarah Palin:

Obama said the media should back off the story, and that it has no bearing on Palin’s performance as Governor of Alaska or what kind of Vice President she would be. He denies anyone in his campaign is responsible for spreading rumors about Palin, and adds that anyone caught doing so would be fired.

Also:

“People’s families are off limits,” he said. “People’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. ”

“I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories,” he added. “That shouldn’t be a topic in our politics.”

“We don’t go after people’s families. Our people are not involved in any way,” he said.

STATUS: O RLY?

On Friday’s Laura Ingraham radio show (audio here), a member of the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee, Howard Gutman, directly and forcefully questioned the parenting. of Gov. Sarah Palin.

He hasn’t been fired.

UPDATE (September 16):

♦At a campaign stop in Golden, CO, Obama states “In January, I outlined a plan to help revive our faltering economy,” Obama said, “which formed the basis for a bipartisan stimulus package that passed the Congress.”

STATUS: Bullcrap.

Jake Tapper:

Is that true?

Democrats on Capitol Hill who support Obama say no.

Wanting Obama to win, however, none will say so on the record.

***

In Vienna, Ohio, this afternoon, McCain said that Obama today “claimed that the Congressional stimulus package was his idea. That’s news to those of us in Congress who supported it. Senator Obama didn’t even show up to vote.”

That’s true. (McCain was there, and he voted for it.)

Moreover, Obama today was guilty of inflating his role in the creation of that bill.

UPDATE:(September 20):

Via Fact Check:

♦A new Obama ad characterizes the “Bush-McCain privatization plan” as “cutting Social Security Benefits in half.”

STATUS: A lie designed to scare seniors.

This is a falsehood sure to frighten seniors who rely on their Social Security checks. In truth, McCain does not propose to cut those checks at all.

Fact Check again:

♦In Daytona Beach, Obama said that “if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week.”

He referred to “elderly women” at risk of poverty, and said families would be scrambling to support “grandmothers and grandfathers.”

STATUS: Another lie designed to scare seniors.

That’s not true. The plan proposed by President Bush and supported by McCain in 2005 would not have allowed anyone born before 1950 to invest any part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. All current retirees would be covered by the same benefits they are now.

Just the same crap Dems pull every four years, only on steroids.